Gallery view of a Time’s Arrow rehearsal on Zoom. Photo courtesy of Rodney Lister

Music

CFA Ensemble Time’s Arrow to End the Year with a Zoom Concert Thursday

Students composed pieces with videoconferencing software limitations in mind

For the members of Time’s Arrow, the new music ensemble at the College of Fine Arts, there’s an upside to performing on videoconferencing app Zoom, where they cannot truly synchronize sound, audio quality, or internet speeds.

“The bright side of this is it gives us the perfect excuse to play music that might seem strange to newcomers,” says cellist Michael Frontz (CFA’21). “Of course we’re not all playing rhythmically with each other—it’s impossible.”

Time’s Arrow will give its end-of-semester performance Thursday, April 30, at 7 pm as a webinar on the Zoom software platform, which has become a lot more familiar to listeners now than it was a couple of months ago. Time’s Arrow Remote and Connected includes compositions by three ensemble members and Times Arrow’s director Rodney Lister, a CFA School of Music lecturer in music, composition, and music theory. Enjoy the concert here.

“My piece was specifically written to utilize Zoom’s algorithm for picking up sound,” says composition student Brad Barker (CFA’21), whose “Leisure” will open the program. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out the algorithm and what kinds of things were going to work in the Zoom environment. Lister describes Barker’s composition as a “follow the leader” piece.

“Like everything else we’re experiencing, this is uncharted territory,” says  guitarist Barker, who will also perform the piece with other ensemble members. “When we first rehearsed it, we realized this may very well be the first piece written for Zoom, something that has become the center of all of our worlds. A really cool—and bizarre—thought.”

The 15-plus student performers range from freshmen to master’s students and include pianists, guitarists, violinists, cellists, clarinetists, and more. All have their own tech setup, making Zoom rehearsals more challenging. “It’s interesting not being in the same room with people,” Lister says, “but in this situation, as I find in my classes, people have been just so happy to be together that they’ve kind of enjoyed it.”

The ensemble members looked into software that would supposedly make it possible to sync sound, he says, but none quite worked, so no Mozart string quartets. “It occurred to me that we could probably do music that would work with [Zoom’s limitations], and I emailed people and they were into it.” 

Lister’s own composition, “A Journal of the Plague Year,” is based on the book of the same title by Daniel Defoe, which he picked up as the pandemic was gathering steam. The piece is very Zoom, in that it has people talking over each other as well as playing.

Lister also seems tickled that they’re performing John Cage’s “4’33””—the score instructs the performers not to play their instruments at all during its three “movements.” It’s better described as 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Even more challenging than silence, though, may be “Our Music,” by composition student Elena Levi (CFA’20), who plays violin in the ensemble. The piece “was inspired by walking around BU’s campus and wondering what music students listen to as they go about their days,” she says. Members of the ensemble each listen to songs of their choosing and sing, hum, or whistle along to what they’re listening to in their earbuds or headphones. The result is a glimpse into each performer’s personal taste in music.

That may sound chaotic, but Levi has been thinking intensely about how to make it work. In some sections, the performers take turns stepping to the foreground. In other sections, everyone hums a single tone from their songs, which leads to “really interesting group chords,” she says.

“Elena’s piece is well suited to this situation—it’s particularly entertaining in the gallery view on Zoom,” Lister says.

“I started working on this piece a few months ago and was planning to have it performed live,” Levi says. “I almost scrapped it when I heard we would not be returning to campus after spring break, but the ensemble’s dedication and passion for capturing my idea has made me so glad that we’re still going to perform it.

“Hearing my fellow ensemble members perform this piece definitely makes me nostalgic for those walks around campus, though,” she says. 

Considering that, it may be exactly the right piece to play this week.